Best alternatives for CVS

The Concurrent Versioning System (CVS), is a free software revision control system. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers (potentially widely separated in space and/or time) to collaborate.

CVS is the most commonly used revision control system in the Open-Source world and it works well. It is reliable but has many limitations;

It does not do file renames or copies,

Can not send the files to the server

No atomicity of operations (Atomic commits)

No good handling of binary files.

Are you tired of using CVS? However, There are better alternatives for CVS.

Aegis is a transaction-based software configuration management system. It provides a framework within which a team of developers may work on many changes to a program independently, and Aegis coordinates integrating these changes back into the master source of the program, with as little disruption as possible.

GNU Arch is a distributed revision control system that is part of the GNU Project and licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is used to keep track of the changes made to a source tree and to help programmers combine and otherwise manipulate changes made by multiple people or at different times.

Bazaar is an open-source decentralized and distributed version control system, released under the GNU GPL and supported by Canonical Ltd., designed to make it easier for anyone to contribute to free and open source software projects.

BitKeeper is a proprietary revision control system by BitMover Inc. that used to be available for free software developers under a gratis license. BitKeeper builds upon many of the TeamWare concepts. Its key selling point is the ease with which distributed development teams can keep their own local source repositories and still work with the central repository.

Monotone is an open source software tool for distributed revision control. Monotone tracks revisions to files, groups sets of revisions into changesets, and tracks history across renames. A capable version control system with a different philosophy, and strong reliance on strong cryptography. The design principle is distributed operation making heavy use of cryptographic primitives to track file revisions (via the SHA1secure hash) and to authenticate user actions (via RSAcryptographic signatures).

Perforce is a commercial version control system developed by Perforce Software, Inc., which is very fast, robust, portable and also quite powerful. It requires a per-developer yearly licensing, but a gratis license is also available for open source developers but without support.

Subversion (SVN) is a version control system used to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly-compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). A revision control system that was designed and programmed from the ground’s up to be modular and scalable, yet resembling CVS a bit in nature. Not as feature-rich as BitKeeper yet, but fully open-source.

Vesta is a software configuration management system originally designed by Digital Corp (Compaq). Now distributed under the LGPL. Replaces both Make and CVS, and so can only be built with itself for the time being.

For more details on these CVS alternatives, please visit a wonderful website BetterSCM, that carries details on features, drawbacks etc of each revision control discussed here.